Official Subreddit of the PC Master Race We're the largest community of PC enthusiasts on the Internet. Begin your ascension today!

General Information

Everybody is welcome here, even those that have yet to ascend.

This is not a satirical or 'circlejerk subreddit'. Nor did it start as one. This is a normal subreddit with occasional tongue-in-cheek humor elements. We are a community where many of its members share similar opinions about the main topics, and sometimes end up having private jokes amongst ourselves. We are not a community where members feign stupidity when posting and commenting because they find it funny. You can be banned if you conduct yourself like that here.

You don't necessarily need a PC to be a member of the PCMR. You just have to recognize that the PC is objectively superior to consoles as explained here. It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart!

Rule #1 Harassment of others is strictly forbidden. We will not tolerate any kind of incitement to action against anyone, nor will we allow the posting of information that can be used to harm others (celebrities or not).

6.6: Feigning idiocy when posting or commenting, or linking to such content.

Rule #7 Age, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion, political affiliation and economic status are all irrelevant here. All are welcome in the PC Master Race. Also, linking the PC Master Race with racial supremacy or any kind of fascist ideologies, or making distasteful analogies in this regard, is not acceptable in the slightest.

Rule #8 No begging. No soft begging. No Implicit or explicit trading. No buying. No Selling. No asking for valuation. No asking how or where to do these either.

Rule #9 Message the mods first, and wait for permission, if your post/comment is NSFW. Do not mark your post as NSFW or as Spoiler unless it actually is NSFW or a Spoiler.

Rule #10 Screenshots of "peasantry," including but not limited to conversations on Reddit, other websites or sms/chat screenshots where ignorance is being spewed and/or ridiculed, must be text posts.

Giveaway Rules

The Master Race is generous. When we do giveaways we do it within the bounds of our subreddit and only for subreddit members. Feel free to give prizes as you see fit, but don't mandate subscriptions or other benefits. You can post about your channel or project, but don't make it a requirement to visit, comment or subscribe to an external place to enter a giveaway or to increase the likelihood of winning.

Even if you do a giveaway on the subreddit, you can not directly promote a specific giveaway happening elsewhere.

Users giving away physical items must provide photo proof of ownership (including their username and date) in the giveaway thread. Shipping fees must be entirely financed by the user doing the giveaway (limiting the winner's location is allowed).

No conditional (I will only giveaway if) giveaways. If you start it, someone must win it. You cannot delete your giveaway once you post it.

Giveaways shouldn't last an absurd amount of time, nor should they be absurdly difficult to enter or win.

Do not choose your giveaway winners based on the number of upvotes or downvotes they get.

Giveaways to benefit registered charities must be verified by moderators. All other requests for donations (monetary or otherwise) are not allowed as per rule #8.

Only one entry per user to any giveaway unless otherwise stated by the giveaway poster.

Under special circumstances, we allow giveaways to require users to visit a page outside the subreddit, but that must conform to our outside giveaway guidelines.

Let's get straight to the point, I pirated games before. I don't do it anymore because I support the developers, and feel bad when I steal a game. I know tons of people who do it.

What do you all think of PC piracy?

PS: I do plan on being very active in the conversations, so please try to make opinions constructive.

Edit: I'm Glad everyone is sharing their opinions, me and my friends seem to discuss this a lot. It's good to see the community like this.

More on my opinion: I do not pirate, although some very good points have been brought up, use it like a demo etc... I'm not sure if this is true but to me it seems piracy has lowered in the last couple years. With steam, GMG, amazon, and other services have become more prominent. I don't feel the need to pirate Borderlands 2 when I can get it for $13, or Fallout 3+New Vegas for $5. To me it seems as more people convert to the master race, less people pirate, as they realize just how much cheaper it is. Picture this; a console gamer moves over to PC, accustomed to paying $60 for a new AAA game, now sees how much even $10 makes. It's not huge but way better knowing that in a month it'll be on sale $30.

Theft is wrong in and of itself, by the virtue of taking away stuff from other people.

With piracy, there are only specific instaces where it carries any problem that is even similar, like decreasing the potential profits of publishers. In other cases, it doesn't.

I support supporting the publishers, but everyone who doesn't have infinite money has occasions where they kinda want to play a game (or access any other content), but it wouldn't fit into their budget. In those cases, I don't see anything morally wrong with piracy.

Piracy as a replacement of buying is freeloading and wrong. Piracy as a complemement of buying, benefits me without harming anyone else, and on a large scale, can help the industry by increasing the users' perspective, and introducing them to more promising genres, franchises, etc. that they might end up appreciating enough to buy.

This is the same thing i feel. As I mentioned before I have torrented before, I just don't know why it seems so popular to do it. Knowing that it effects the PC gaming industry so many people continue to do it.

Similar, the only game I pirated since starting to use steam was GTA IV, but that's just because I heard such terrible things about the DRM. I would have bought it, I really would, but I just heard that it was unuseable. Sim City I would have torrented if it worked offline, I've since lost interest, so fuck that.

It's even worse in Australia. Games get much too expensive here and Steam has no justification for it (physical games have shipping costs so I can kind of understand EB Games). Even the cheap stores still aren't as cheap as America.

Edit: Forgot to mention that this is why my friends pirate anything that doesn't have good multiplayer. They seem to be proud of themselves after they do it, which is odd.

I am with you there.
I had been burned by paying full price for a game and finding out it was shit after an hour of playing it too many times in the past. This happens a lot less thanks to steam. I can't even remember the last game I pirated.

I pirate games all the time (PC, Xbox 360, PS3, PSP, etc.). I pirate anything and everything I can. The only time I will buy a game is if it has multiplayer I am interested in. BF3, Diablo 3, Starcraft II...

I do recommend many games I have pirated to many people though. These are games I would not have been able to recommend had I not pirated the games. Of those who I recommend games to, I know many who buy them. So... Yeah... It is what it is.

Personally, I think piracy is wrong. Especially when people pirate Indie games because they don't have great profit margins to begin with. Some people, such as EA, kinda deserve it, especially with Origin and the whole "you've got to install our spyware to ply the game you have already paid for scenario.

I guess that kinda is the point. Piracy is an issue because most publishers don't provide the service people want with their games. People want to go "click, click, wait, play" (eg with steam) or "go to shop, buy, install, play" (it's sometimes nice to have the physical copy). What we do not want to do is "buy, install, activate, install client, agree to 20 pages of EULA in which we sell our souls, install other random stuff, remove client from boot sequence, log into 2 clients you've got to make new accounts for, play, game crashes because internet connection is lost during local play, rage, and we can't do anything because we've already spent money on the game". With piracy, it's just "download, scan, install play" - the "risk" massively outweighs the irritation. Until publishers (such as EA) provide that level of service, piracy is the easy, hassle free alternative.

Hey even Gaben himself said that to defeat piracy you have to provide better service.

"One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates. For example, Russia. You say, oh, we’re going to enter Russia, people say, you’re doomed, they’ll pirate everything in Russia. Russia now outside of Germany is our largest continental European market."

I used to pirate almost everything. Even before fast internet speeds, you could buy CD's with convenient interfaces that would not only install your game for you, but even crack it (If that was necessary). That was back in mid-nineties. They stripped the soundtracks from the games, so you could have 20 of the latest games fit on a single CD.

I mean, everyone pirated back then. It was incredibly wide-spread. And not just games either. I was one of those people who downloaded on Napster every single day when that blew up.

It's not that I didn't want to pay for a good product, it was just that pirating was so much easier, and I didn't get anything extra out of buying the product. Sometimes I got even less. Why buy a copy of Diablo if you HAVE to have the CD sit in the drive while playing? I might as well install it from my pirated collection, and then I didn't need a CD at all. That also cost me not half as much, not a quarter, but at least ten times less.

Now I truly believe that most companies have learned that if they want to sell a product, then they need to offer you extra value. I would buy a game if it included nice maps, cool box art, or incredible soundtracks (Which is why I bought Diablo 2 when that came out), or online multiplayer that is engaging. But I'll never buy a game that gives me no reason to buy it. The price has to fit the product. The fact is: If I pirated it, I was probably never going to buy it anyway.

EDIT: I should probably clarify that I don't pirate games or music anymore.

The fact is: If I pirated it, I was probably never going to buy it anyway.

This might is part of what i think makes piracy an actual non-issue for companies.

If a developer uses strong restrictive anti-piracy methods you are only affecting the consumers that buy the game from official channels, while someone might find a way to unlock the content and crack it making it available to everyone. In this case the pirated version has more benefits than the official version and that's really stupid.

In the end the people that is going to pirate and not buy the game will do tha regardless and never would have become a potential buyer, specially if the pirated version is better (more freedom, no DRM).

Yes. All that DRM crap actually only causes problems for the paying customers and the guys who crack it. And, let's be realistic here, the crackers are just as skilled and intelligent, if not more (usually more) than the guys making the DRM. They WILL crack it eventually, usually soon. You are only alienating you customers.

I pirate on occasion. If I find a game I like I'll buy it. In no means will I justify it but I find the lack of demos these days and the fact that we've just gone through 8+ years of games that clearly were made for console first or FPS games made for controllers, its pretty difficult for me to buy a full priced game on faith alone.

But yeah Steam, GoG, Desura, Greenman etc have done wonders not just for prices but how games are just automatically updated. That alone is a service worth the pennies.

Honestly, I'm yet to have an origin problem. For the most part, everything works perfectly. After having it for over a year, buying about 20 games on it, and using it regularly, i can honestly say it gets a lot more shit than it deserves.

I just don't trust EA, they do what ever helps their bottom line first and think of their customers second. Their latest debacle of SimCity proves that much. I don't trust them enough to buy games via their digital platform because there may come a time when they decide it isn't worth their effort have a digital platform.

Don't get me wrong I'm not going around yelling go to hell you evil thefts! I just believe if you have the ability (financially) to have a PC that can run the newest AAA game, you should have enough to buy it.

It's not exclusive to the Pc platform.
Since you can't measure the amount of people that pirated and then later bought down the line, or the amount of people that torrent-ed as one person can torrent more then once.

It's flagrant on the consoles, and as the prices are higher even 2nd I'd have a guess that less people would be later buying a copy.

I rarely pirate but there are cases of it every so often. It usually revolves around me trying to play something, finding my disc is damaged beyond repair, looking at the cost to replace it, finding the only places that have it want like $90... Well, I'm not going to pay $90 for impossible creatures or Rise of Nations...

To me this makes sense. It's a scenario where you DID purchase the game, and need another way of downloading. Similar to indie HB's where you have both DRM and standalone, you bought it you should download it however many times you want on any computer.

it's not gone yet, but soon it will be... forever. The only game I got GFWL to cooperate with me was for Dark Souls, and even then I had to go through MANY hoops just to get it working... piece of crap.

I grew up in a time and place where you could buy a pirated copy of basically any game for a dollar or two. As a child and young adult I thought piracy was normal.

But having grown up, I now think piracy is definitely breaking the law and morally wrong. The rules of trading are basically the same no matter what the goods are. The seller agrees to give X to you with some conditions usually involving money. Unless the seller agrees to something else, you can only take X if you abide by the conditions, otherwise it is considered stealing.

In the case of video games (movies, music, etc.), the seller agrees to sell you a copy of the game for $Y usually with some conditions such as that you do not copy and/or hack the copy protection of the game to distribute it to others. Thus if you copy the game for others, you are not keeping to the agreement and thus stealing. If you knowingly take a pirated copy of the game, then you are knowingly taking stolen goods. Your government most likely will charge you with theft or something equivalent even if you knowingly buy stolen goods, nevermind taking them for free.

It's also worth noting that none of this changes even if...

the seller's costs have been covered. E.g. If a baker recoups the cost of baking a cake by selling one slice, does that mean other slices should be free?

you think the price (or any part of the conditions of sale) is unfair. E.g. If I think a Lambo is absurdly expensive, can I just take it without paying?

you disagree with the seller's business practice. E.g. If you disapprove of Nike using third world child labor, can you just steal their shoes?

Bottom line: Piracy is stealing. You have obtained goods against the terms and conditions of the seller.

When I'm broke, I torrent games. If the game truly is any good I normally tell my friends about this game and some of them could buy it (same with music or anything else). If anything torrenting is advertising and the whole ''you're stealing content and you are a fucking degenerate for doing it'' is waaaaaaay out of line. I remember ages ago seeing a study done in Switzerland which proved that pirating has no effect in the industry. I truly believe that. All the negative hype about piracy in the last few recent years was created by Hollywood lobbyists simply because the industry over there wants everything - all the money they could imagine, pools and pools of money.

Sometimes, when I want to get a game on steam and see it has a ton of bad reviews I often torrent it and see if it's as bad as they say...if it isn't I'll get it on steam. (did that with Day One : Garry's Incident...don't buy that game, EVER)

Is it just me or does it feel like game developers just don't stand behind what they make like they use to? At least with a demo version you are letting your product speak for its self. You know if you sold 10 million copies it is because your game was worth it.

Now, it is all about how much hype can they generate to get you to blindly buy what they are selling. That is just how it feels to me. I think that is the one reason I do not have anything against pirating. Personally, I don't do it anymore, but I honestly can not hate on any that does it. Game devs really don't have a leg to stand on when they bitch and moan about piracy for that reason as well.

I think thats true. Look at Saints Row IV, there's a demo because they know it's good. Games like Aliens: Colonial Marines have no demo because they know it's terrible. It's not the case with everything but it's very common nowadays.

Yeah, take a look at kerbal space program for example if you hear it is a game about sending rockets to space. For some people that is really appealing and some (including me) are not sure if they will like it so i downloaded the demo and and i loved it and instantly bought it.

I know others may see it differently, but I believe that is how things should work. If they game is good, people will buy it!

We as the customers have to realize that we LET these companies pull us in with their hype and we practically throw our money at them. We need to start talking with our wallets and stop doing that. If they want our money make those fuckers earn it by not putting out shit games anymore.

I think If its a decent PC port then its worthy of buying(can it for for as low as $10 6 months after release anyway) but if its some garbage that some peasant developer is involved in I think PC players can justify downloading it to try it out first.

I personally don't pirate games, with the exception of games I already have and old console games not available to buy digitally. But it's kinda a nonsensicaly standard - mostly I'm doing it for a mix of feeling good and for bragging rights, because I pirate the hell out of everything else! I'm not going to say it's morally wrong to pirate. Not any more than, say, not donating to charity. Which I also do. For bragging rights!

That being said, I do not like the people who say they pirate because they felt the developers/publishers "deserve it". Whether it's DRM related (actual malware excluded), or that they don't like companies basing their price off the Consumer Price Index instead of the Exchange Rate, or because they just don't like the company in question. It always stuck me as a cross between hipsterism and a victim complex.

...

...Oh, and Japanese games. I always pirate games without an official translation. No real reason for it, I just always felt that it's an acceptable exception if the game was never sold here to begin with. Sorry ZUN.

Whether it's purchased or stolen your still playing their game. It's a lost sale but not for lack of quality but because of the individuals ignorance. I'm not a big fan of EA, but i'm not going to avoid every good game developers worked their asses off to make because the boss is a douche.

I use it as a combination of a demo and a placeholder. I pirate a game to get a feel for it, and if I like it I will keep it installed for a while and play some more. At some point, if I still like the game, I will add it to the "to buy" list, and continue playing the pirated copy until I can afford the full version. Even if I beat the game before I can afford the full version, I still buy the full version (Bioshock Infinite).

I got used to buying games since I started using steam because of Dota 2, Still I pirate games I can't afford or don't think are worthy of my money. Mostly if I pirate it's offline games I can't afford but still wan't to play, Such as Deadpool or Batman series

I used to pirate stuff a lot. But then two things happened: 1) I actually started earning my own money and thus having a lot more to spend, so i could afford most of the games i liked; 2) i registered on to Steam.

Basically, these are the two things why people like me or my friends pirate stuff. I know some are doing just because they can, but those are rare nowadays.

The thing is, pirates beat publishers in one simple thing: ease of content delivery. The more easier you can buy stuff properly, the less piracy there will be. Yes, it will not totally extinguish piracy, but it will return the investments.

Oh, also people don't like to pay for stuff more than they think it's worth. Yes, i'm looking at you, crappy overpriced games developers.

And lastly, I still on occassion 'pirate' a game that I actually own, simply to get around the restrictions -- such as always-on or otherwise intrusive DRM, or just apply a simple NO-CD crack so i don't have to have that thing spinning in my DVD drive (I don't even have the darn thing nowadays).

While I used to pirate a lot 10 years ago while I was a senior in hs. I dropped off about 7 to 8 years ago. I have only recently (starting again in the last 2 to 3 years) began to replace a hand full of legacy games that I lost in house fire. Though those are games I cannot find on gog and by other reasonable means. All of the games, I had owned in the past. And for most of them I still have surviving documents. Ie books or jewel cases, and boxes that were in a surviving trunk. To bad my cd books were by my ( sadly at the time my extra crispy) 3 month old rig that I spent $1600 on. Many of those games in those 3 cases were floppy disks both the 3.5 and the 5 in floppys. And all the other games I had streaching through out my child hood.
Edit: I hate posting on phones.

I used to download games when i was still on school, one of my favorites was Skyrim, played almost 200 hours.

After i finished school and got a job the first thing i got was the Collector's Edition of Skyrim, so piracy isn't really a bad thing to me personally, even in the description of any download they encourage you to help the developers and buy the game if you can.

Right now i have almost 500 hours played on skyrim and over 100 games on steam and this might not have happened if i had not downloaded Skyrim in the first place.

I'm sure it's been mentioned before on this post, but to be frank, it's FAR easier to mod a Xbox/PS3/Wii and burn a disk the same day as release on 99.95% of games than waiting for "the scene" to crack it for PC.

I like to try out the games before i buy them. And in some cases, it has really saved me a lot of money. Like, some games might be hyped and even though popular, it may not appeal to you. A good example; back in 06, i downloaded COH - turned out to be awesome, so i bought it. This year, COH2 comes out - sucks balls; thank god i tested this before i bought it.

This is how I feel with a lot of games. And people don't seem to get it. Devs on small teams making games like ftl or big teams working on Tomb Raider aren't being paid a ton of money and when you pirate it's just abusing of a great bunch of people who worked really hard for you to have fun.

I used to pirate almost everything because I had no income. Before I had a job, I could probably count on 1 hand the number of games I'd bought.
Now, 1 year after finding a job, my steam library is at 1400$+, I've only maybe spent 200-250$ on it though.
I still download music, usually because I can't find a place to buy it or because it's way too expensive. Ain't paying 10 bucks for 8 songs!

I used to pirate like crazy. Pretty much every game I played. Then I started to earn money, and haven't priated a game since. Own about 150 games now.

I didn't pirate to "try it out", I didn't pirate because I couldn't buy digital. I pirated because I wanted to play the games and couldn't afford them all. I could have afforded a few of them, but just thought "fuck it".

Now, that buying a game is like buying a pack of gum, I see no reason to pirate. It's easier and and I get a better product when I buy it.

I still pirate TV-series, because I can't be arsed to wait for them to come on Netflix or similar. Let me buy them, and I will.

Well, Steam's service was there while I was pirating. So on, not all about service. It's also about money. If $60 is a lot to you, and you can get 80% of the game for free, many people will take it for free. Blaming service, DRM, using it as a "Demo" is mostly just excuses, and not the real reason.

I've actually purchased most of the games I need to pirate at one point or another. Old recordable media gets damaged, what else are you going to do? I'm not going to buy it a second time.

I love how console people pretend piracy is limited to computers. I'm sitting on a modded xbox and ps1 that beg to differ. It's pretty easy to play burnt discs, and even easier to find pirated console games that are playable on consoles.

I used to pirate a lot (actually, 80% of the games I played were pirated) when I was younger (10-18). Reasons were simple: I did not have enough money. When the minimum wage in your country is x3.5 the average cost of an AAA title, you really can't justify the purchase before you start a real job.
However, I do not believe I have damaged the industry in any way by pirating and more than half the people who pirate do not either (IMO). Like other people said: If your choices are a) Do not play the game or b) Pirate the game, when you pirate you do not take away profits from the developers. They were never going to get them anyway, because you were never going to buy the game. To be honest, even now I pirate occasionally. If a game seems interesting I will torrent and play it. If it is good, I will buy it. If it is shit, then the developers will get shit as well. The only exception are always online games like diablo 3, where you cannot get an accurate feel of the game before you buy it. Man, fuck diablo 3.

I buy everything. Haven't pirated games or music in years. I love seeing all the games I own on Steam/Origin. I actually rebought all the games i physically owned, on steam so I have about 250 games with me wherever I'm at (laptop master race) .

It also helps the devs, I mean if I buy a game I really like then I wanna pay them and let em know they did a good job in hopes for another awesome game.

I'll wait like 3 months to buy something if I cannot justify full price. Saints row IV, paid full price. Black Ops II, got for $10 a few months back. Borderlands 1, waited till it was on sale for like $35 so it all depends. I buy a lot of full price games. When the sales come, I put about 100-200 in my steam wallet the day the sale begins and just splurge on anything.

I used to pirate quite a bit, not really now.
Now generally pirate games to see if they're worth my money. Kerbal space program for expample. I pirated it, found myself playing it for the whole day, and now own it on steam.

I am glad this subreddit isn't super hostile towards pirating like most other gaming communities. I am for piracy in certain cases like when the game isn't even available to buy. I dont understand while some old pc games that you can't even find in stores anymore are not made free to play. Pretty much every company is cut throat when it comes to their profits so I don't feel any sympathy when they cry about piracy and then add DRM that ruins it for people who bought it (e.g. Simcity 3).

This is one of those comments I can sympathize on, DRM isn't the solution to end piracy. Punishment towards those who did nothing wrong is very unfair. Like for example simcity I think they would've sold more if there weren't so many problems with the DRM. Always online isn't really a problem but not being able to play alone is not okay. Some games have gotten away in the past though, BF3 on PC requires Internet for single player (but seriously who even plays that).

Agreed. But IMO always online is one of the worst forms a DRM esp. when the game was meant to be an offline game. Going on with the Simcity example, they limited the size you could make the city because it would've taken too much space on their servers. So the map-size was downgraded to smaller sizes than even the previous generations in order to make it always online. It also affects countless other things like moddability (when some of the code is server-side it's very hard to mod), privacy, and most games discontinue their online support and that's always nice...

Medal of honour Airbourne i think was the last one i "previewed" after being warned by a mate that it was not as good as earlier ones and short. After completing it twice in 6 hours i was sure as hell not going to pay £30 for a game thats shorter than LOTR movie.

I am at the age and financial situation where i would rather purchase a game when its on sale than bother to pirate and patch it etc.

However I have often been bitten by shit like GFWL and had i known those game had that crap bolted on i would have just pirated them. Fuck the likes of GFWL, i can tolerate steam DRM as it has more benefits than dissadvantages but when i have to delete profiles and cant save my game because windows live is shit and wont connect its bollocks.

I feel no remorse for downloading a copy of a game i am unsure of. If it is good i will purchase it when it is on sale. If it is crap, too short etc i wont. No one seems to put out good playable demo's anymore and game prices are too damn high at release.